‘Powerful’ VMware Cloud On Dell EMC Data Center-as-a-Service Launched

‘We’re taking this notion [and model] of cloud and applying that to on-premises to give customers all the benefits of cloud with all the benefits of on-premises environments. So it’s the best of both worlds,’ says Kit Colbert, vice president and chief technology officer for VMware’s Cloud Platform Business Unit.

The sky is the limit for Dell Technologies “powerful” new consumption-based, on-premise Cloud Data Center-as-a-Service product, looking to take the cloud infrastructure market by storm with VMware Cloud on Dell EMC.

“This extends our ability to talk to customers about what their business is trying to achieve, what value they’re trying to create and then helping to assemble the underlying technology to make it all happen – this is powerful and Dell hit it right on the mark,” said Dan McCormick, executive vice president of Davenport Group, a St. Paul, Minn.-based Dell EMC and VMware partner and 2018 CRN Triple Crown winner.

The new Dell Technologies Cloud Data Center-as-a-Service is a consumption-based management service for VMware Cloud on Dell EMC infrastructure. The tightly VMware-Dell integrated offering including VMware Cloud Foundation, the VMware Cloud stack and VxRail, which is Dell EMC and VMware’s market leading hyper-converged infrastructure solution.

The offering delivers public cloud agility and simplicity to on-premise workloads fully managed by Dell Technologies which can be sold by channel partners. The new cloud service stemmed from Project Dimension, which extended VMware Cloud to deliver Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) infrastructure and hardware as a service to the on-premises world alongside Dell with built-in technologies including vSAN and SAN SD-WAN by VeloCloud. VMware Cloud on Dell EMC also offers a bi-directional connection to public clouds for application and data portability via a hybrid cloud control plane.

[Related: Dell Technologies Cloud: ‘The Best Hybrid Cloud Platform On Earth’]

“We’re taking this notion of cloud and taking the model of cloud and applying that to on-premises to give customers all the benefits of cloud with all the benefits of on-premises environments. So it’s the best of both worlds,” said Kit Colbert, vice president and chief technology officer for VMware’s Cloud Platform Business Unit. “The value proposition here is just the full power of VMware SDDC. We talked about the need for having multiple cloud and compatibility across those clouds, that’s exactly what we’re delivering here with VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. It’s super easy for customers to use.”

Colbert added, “This a cloud service so you’re using APIs, you’re requesting new hardware through it and we’re monitoring it and taking action on it. The benefit for the customer is they do not have to deal with all the infrastructure pluming anymore -- that’s handed over to VMware and Dell EMC to handle. That allows the customers to actually focus on high-level concerns.”

Davenport’s McCormick said offering opens the door for the channel to provide higher-level services for customers and create a stickier relationship by being able to focus on solving business objectives compared to talking about the speeds and feeds of the technology.

“In some ways this removes a layer between the hardware and business value, and allows us to get closer to connect to the business goals of the customer,” McCormick said. “In a world where we’re really focused on the internal and external transformation for customers, when you can have conversations about workloads and your customers roadmap, then how technology is going to enable that – this is sort of the final step of bringing the vision together of being able to manage your applications and workloads first and foremost without having to worry about all the underlying details about where the hardware, software and workloads actually run.”

Instead of having conversations about the latest and greatest features in a product, McCormick is planning on selling Dell’s new data center on-premise service to create new sales opportunities around architecture planning, application design, data continuity and “overall, just aligning the company’s vision and IT resources” through advisory services.

“So much of the spending in IT today is being led by business leaders outside of the technology departments, so their first and foremost view is around the business. For partners who can have those conversations, this is a great opportunity for us,” said McCormick.

Dell Technologies Cloud Data Center-as-a-Service will become available in the second half of 2019. The service will be sold as a monthly subscription with no capex outlay on one or three-year agreements with consumption-based availability similar to how VMware Cloud on AWS is sold, said Matt Baker, senior vice president, Dell EMC Strategy and Planning.

“In essence, it’s exactly the same as VMware Cloud on AWS,” said Baker. “The VMware Cloud on AWS service can be consumed on-demand – you swipe a credit card and pay for it by the period – but the vast majority of cloud consumption after initial experimentation is finished is reserved instances. So you can purchase one-year, three-year reserved instances. The same is true for VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. So you purchase a reserved instance of capacity and that capacity starts initially with a three-node cluster, with a two-node cluster to come, and you can add to that cluster and you purchase reserved instances of that service.”

The new Cloud Data Center-as-a-Service was unveiled at Dell Technologies World 2019 on Monday as part of the company’s new Dell Technologies Cloud, marking the Round Rock, Texas-based infrastructure giant’s biggest cloud push in recent memory.

Dell Technologies World is being held in Las Vegas from April 29 to May 2.